🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

Last time, I left you with something that approaches our problem, the problem of desire and its interpretation: a certain ordination of the signifying structure, of what is articulated within the signifier as containing this internal duplicity of the statement:

• The process of the statement,
• And the process of the act of enunciation.

I emphasized the distinction that exists:

• Between the “I” as implicated in any given statement, the “I” as, on equal footing with any other, being the subject of a stated process—for instance, a grammatical subject, though this is not the sole mode of a statement,
• And the “I” as implicated in every enunciation, especially as it announces itself as the “I” of enunciation.

This mode under which it announces itself as the “I” of enunciation, the mode of its announcement, is not inconsequential when it names itself, as in the case of little Anna FREUD at the beginning of the message in her dream. I pointed out that an ambiguity remains here: whether this “I,” as the “I” of enunciation, is authenticated at that moment or not.

I suggested that it is not yet authenticated and that this constitutes the difference Freud indicates as distinguishing the child’s dream desire from the adult’s dream desire. It is that something remains incomplete, precipitated by the structure but not yet distinguished within it. This “something” is precisely what I have shown you elsewhere as its reflection and trace.

A belated trace, found on the level of a test that, of course, presupposes conditions already well-defined by experience—conditions that do not allow us to prejudge, at their core, the subject’s position. Yet, the difficulty persists for a long time for the subject in distinguishing the “I” of enunciation from the “I” of the statement. This difficulty manifests in the stumbling block presented by the test that chance and the psychologist’s intuition led BINET to choose, in the form:

“I have three brothers: Paul, Ernest, and me.”

The difficulty lies in the child not recognizing the required meaning of this statement—that is, the subject has not yet learned to count themselves correctly. But this trace that I marked for you is an indicator, and there are others, of this essential element: the distinction, the difference for the subject, between the “I” of enunciation and the “I” of the statement.

Now, as I told you, we are not approaching this through deduction but by a path that I cannot call empirical, as it is already traced, already constructed by Freud. Freud tells us that the adult’s dream desire is a borrowed desire and bears the mark of repression—a repression he identifies at this level as a censorship.

When Freud delves into the mechanism of this censorship and reveals what censorship entails—its impossibilities—it is here that he places emphasis. It was this point that I asked you to pause and reflect on briefly when I highlighted an internal contradiction inherent in every unsaid at the level of enunciation.

I mean this internal contradiction that structures the “I do not say that…”. I presented this to you the other day in various humorous forms:

“Anyone who says such and such about this or that person, whose words must be respected, must not be offended—let me say—will answer to me!”

What does this mean if not that, in making this proclamation—which is obviously ironic—I am precisely uttering what must not be said? And Freud himself extensively emphasized this…

When he demonstrates the mechanism, the articulation, the meaning of the dream… how frequently the dream takes this route. That is to say, what it articulates as something not to be said is precisely what it has to express, and this is how what is effectively said in the dream comes to pass.

This brings us to something related to the deepest structure of the signifier. I would like to pause here for a moment because this element—the mechanism of the “I do not say…” as such—is not insignificant. FREUD, in his article The Verneinung, places it at the very root of the most primitive sentence, through which the subject constitutes itself as such, particularly as unconscious.

The relationship between this Verneinung and the most primitive Bejahung—with the entry of a signifier into question, as that is what Bejahung is—this is something that begins to emerge.

The issue always concerns what arises at the most primitive level: is it, for instance, the pair “good” and “bad”? Depending on whether we choose or do not choose one or the other of these primitive terms, we are already opting for an entire theory, an entire orientation of our analytical thinking. You are aware of the role that the terms “good” and “bad” have played in a particular specification of the psychoanalytic path. It is, undoubtedly, a very primitive pair.

On this “unsaid” and the function of the “not,” the “not” in “I do not say…,” I will pause for a moment before taking a further step, because I believe this is the essential articulation. This kind of “not” in the “I do not say…” means that, precisely by saying one does not say it, one is in fact saying it—a phenomenon that almost seems absurdly self-evident.

This is something we must pause to consider, recalling what I have already indicated as the most radical property, so to speak, of the signifier.

If you remember, I have already tried to guide you with an image, an example illustrating the relationship between the signifier and a certain kind of index or sign that I called “the trace,” which already carries within itself the mark of some kind of reverse imprint of the real. I spoke to you about Robinson CRUSOE and the footprint, the trace of FRIDAY’s foot, and we paused to consider this: is that already the signifier?

I told you that the signifier begins not with the trace, but with the erasure of the trace. And it is not the erased trace that constitutes the signifier; it is something that is established as erasable that inaugurates the signifier.

In other words, Robinson CRUSOE erases FRIDAY’s footprint, but what does he do in its place?

If he wants to preserve it, the place of FRIDAY’s footprint, he at least makes a cross—that is, one line and another line crossing it. This is the specific signifier. The specific signifier is something that presents itself as erasable in itself, and precisely through this act of erasure, it persists.

What I mean is that the erased signifier already presents itself as such, with its own properties of the “unsaid.” By marking it with a line, I cancel the signifier, yet I perpetuate it indefinitely as such. I inaugurate the dimension of the signifier as such. Making a cross is, properly speaking, something that exists in no other form of marking allowed in any way.

One should not believe that non-speaking beings—animals—do not mark anything, or that they do not intentionally leave traces with the “said,” but only traces of traces. When we have time, we will return to the habits of the hippopotamus and see what it deliberately leaves behind in its steps for its peers.

What man leaves behind him is a signifier—a cross, a bar as barred, as covered by another bar. On the one hand, it indicates that as such, it is erased. This function of the “name of the no,” as the signifier that annuls itself, certainly deserves, by itself, a very long elaboration.

It is striking to see how much logicians, for being, as always, overly psychological, have—

In their classification, in their articulation of negation— Have strangely left aside what is most original.

You may or may not know—and after all, I have no intention of immersing you in the different modes of negation. I simply want to say that, more originally than anything that can be articulated in the order of the concept—

In the order of what distinguishes the meaning of negation, privation, etc.— More originally, it is within the phenomenon of speech, within experience, within linguistic empiricism, that we must find the origin of what is most important to us. That is why I will stop at this point alone.

At this point, I cannot—at least for a moment—refrain from mentioning certain research that carries the weight of experience, particularly that of Édouard PICHON, who was, as you know, one of our elder psychoanalysts. He passed away at the start of the war from a severe cardiac condition. Édouard PICHON, in discussing negation, made a distinction that you should at least have a brief glimpse of, a notion, an idea.

He noticed something and, though ostensibly wanting to be a logician, clearly aimed to be a psychologist. He wrote to us that his work is a kind of exploration, From Words to Thought.

Like many, he was prone to illusions about himself, for fortunately, the weakest part of his work is precisely this claim to trace a path from words to thought. However, he turned out to be an admirable observer, meaning he had a sense for the fabric of language that provided far more insight into words than into thought.

Regarding words, and specifically the use of negation—particularly in French, where he concentrated on the usage of negation—he could not help but uncover this distinction that hinges on what he termed the “forclusive” and the “discordant.” I will provide you with examples to illustrate the distinction he made.

Take, for instance, a sentence like “There is nobody here.” This is “forclusive”: it excludes the possibility of anyone being here at the moment.

PICHON noted something remarkable: whenever French involves pure and simple “forclusion,” it always requires two terms—a “ne” and something else, represented here by “personne,” though it could also be “pas,” as in “I have nowhere to stay” (Je n’ai pas où loger.), or “I have nothing to say to you” (Je n’ai rien à vous dire.).

On the other hand, he observed that many uses of “ne,” particularly the most indicative ones—which, as in all cases, are the ones posing the most paradoxical problems—always manifest themselves. That is to say, almost never is a “ne” used purely and simply to indicate a straightforward negation, which in German or English might be expressed by nicht or not.

The “ne” on its own, left to itself, expresses what he called a “discordance.” This “discordance” occurs precisely between the process of enunciation and the process of the statement.

To clarify and illustrate this immediately, let me give you an example that PICHON himself focused on, as it is particularly illustrative: the usage of these “ne” forms that people who fail to understand—meaning those who try to “understand” too rigidly—call the “expletive ne.”

I mention this because I alluded to it last time regarding an article in Le Monde that I found slightly scandalous, addressing the so-called “expletive ne.” This “expletive ne”—which is not an “expletive ne” but a “ne” essential to the usage of the French language—appears in sentences such as “I fear he may come” (Je crains qu’il ne vienne.).

Everyone knows that “I fear he may come” (Je crains qu’il ne vienne.) means “I fear he will come,” not “I fear he will not come.” Yet in French, one says, “Je crains qu’il ne vienne.” In other words, French—at this stage of its linguistic usage—”captures,” so to speak, the “ne” somewhere at a point one might describe as its wandering state:

• As it descends from the process of enunciation, where the “ne” pertains to the articulation of enunciation, tied to the pure and simple signifier in action: “I do not say that…” (Je ne dis pas que…), as in “I do not say that I am your wife” (Je ne dis pas que je suis ta femme),
• To the “ne” of the statement, as in “I am not your wife” (Je ne suis pas ta femme).

Certainly, we are not here to “trace the genesis of language,” but something is implicated even within our own experience. This…

• This is what I want to show you—what, in any case, FREUD’s articulation of negation indicates to us—
• Implies that negation descends from enunciation to the statement.

And how could we be surprised by this, since, after all, every negation within a statement contains a certain paradox? It posits something, while simultaneously, in certain cases, placing it as non-existent, somewhere in between—somewhere between enunciation and the statement, in this realm:

• Where “discordances” arise,
• Where something in my fear anticipates the event of his coming and—wishing that he does not come—could it be otherwise than to articulate this as “I fear he may come” (Je crains qu’il vienne), or as “I fear he may not come” (Je crains qu’il ne vienne), catching along the way, so to speak, this “ne of discordance,” which stands apart within negation from the “forclusive ne.”

You may say to me:

“This is a phenomenon specific to the French language. You yourself alluded to it earlier when speaking about the German nicht or the English not.”

Of course!

But the important point is not there. The important point is that in the English language, for example, where we articulate analogous things, we observe—though I cannot dwell on this now as I am not here to give you a linguistics lecture—that something similar manifests in the fact that, in English, for instance, negation cannot be applied purely and simply to the verb as the verb of the statement. That is, the verb designating the process within the statement. One does not say, “I eat not,” but rather, “I don’t eat.”

In other words, traces of this can be found in the articulation of the English linguistic system: namely, that for everything pertaining to negation, the statement is compelled to adopt a form modeled on the use of an auxiliary. The auxiliary is typically what introduces the dimension of the subject into the statement.

“I don’t eat,” “I won’t eat,” or “I won’t go”—which, properly speaking, means “I will not go,” and which implies not only the fact but also the subject’s resolution not to go—demonstrates that for every instance of negation as pure and simple negation, something like an auxiliary dimension appears. In the English language, we find the trace of something that fundamentally links negation to a sort of original position of enunciation as such.

The second stage of what I attempted to articulate for you last time consists of the following: to show you by what path, by what means, the subject is introduced into this dialectic of the Other—insofar as this dialectic is imposed upon them by the very structure of the difference between enunciation and statement. I led you down a path that, as I told you, was deliberately empirical. It is not the only one; I mean that I introduced the subject’s real history into it.

I told you that the next step by which, originally, the subject constitutes itself in the process of distinguishing the “I” of enunciation from the “I” of the statement lies in the dimension of “knowing nothing” (n’en rien savoir), insofar as they experience it.

They experience it because, against the backdrop of the Other knowing everything about their thoughts—since their thoughts, by their very nature and structurally from the start, are the discourse of the Other—they discover that the Other, in fact, knows nothing of their thoughts. It is through this realization that the subject embarks on the path we are seeking: the path by which the subject will develop this contradictory demand of the “unsaid” and find the difficult route through which they must embody this “unsaid” in their being, ultimately becoming the kind of being we deal with in psychoanalysis: a subject who possesses the dimension of the unconscious.

This is the essential step that psychoanalysis allows us to take in the experience of humanity. It is this: that after long centuries during which philosophy, I would say, obstinately—and increasingly so—pursued the discourse in which:

• The subject is merely the correlative of the object in the relation of knowledge, meaning the subject is what is presupposed by the knowledge of objects,
• This strange kind of subject, which I once referred to—somewhere, though I no longer recall where—as capable of being the “philosopher’s Sunday hobby,” because for the rest of the week, during work, of course, anyone could easily disregard it,
• This subject that is merely the shadow or the double of objects—

Something about this subject is “forgotten,” namely, that the subject is a speaking subject.

We can no longer forget this, beginning at a certain moment: the moment when their domain as a speaking subject holds its own, whether they are present or absent. What fundamentally alters the nature of their relationships with objects is this crucial point in the nature of those relationships, which is called desire.

It is in this field that we attempt to articulate the relationships of the subject to the object in the sense that they are relationships of desire, for it is in this field that analytic experience teaches us those relationships must be articulated.

The relationship of the subject to the object is not a relationship of need. The relationship of the subject to the object is a complex one, which I am attempting to articulate before you. For the moment, let us begin by indicating this: it is because this relationship, the articulation of the subject to the object, is situated here that the object becomes something that is not the correlate or counterpart of a need of the subject, but rather something that:

• Supports the subject at the precise moment they are confronted, so to speak, with their existence,
• Supports the subject in their existence, in the most radical sense of existence, namely, in that they ex-sist in language.

That is to say, it consists of something external to the subject, something they can grasp in its linguistic nature only at the precise moment when they, as subject, must efface themselves, vanish, disappear behind a signifier. This moment is precisely the “panic” point, so to speak, around which the subject must cling to something—and it is to the object as the object of desire that they cling.

Someone, somewhere—a person I will not name immediately today to avoid confusion—someone entirely contemporary, now deceased, wrote:

“To learn what the miser…
To learn what the miser has lost when his treasure chest is stolen—one would learn a great deal.”

This is exactly what we must learn, I mean learn for ourselves and teach to others. Psychoanalysis is the primary place, the first dimension, where one can respond to this statement. And of course, because the miser is ridiculous—

That is, much too close to the unconscious for you to bear— I must find another, nobler example to help you grasp what I mean.

I could begin to articulate it for you in terms similar to what I said earlier about existence—and in two minutes, you would take me for an existentialist, which is not what I desire.

So, I will take an example from The Rules of the Game, the film by Jean RENOIR. Somewhere in it, the character played by Dalio—a man who is old, as one encounters in life, in a certain social milieu (and it should not be believed that this is even limited to that milieu)—is a collector of objects, particularly music boxes.

If you recall the film, remember the moment when Dalio unveils, before a large audience, his latest discovery: an especially beautiful music box. At that moment, the character is literally in a position we could and must precisely call that of modesty. He blushes, effaces himself, disappears, deeply embarrassed. What he has shown, he has shown.

But how could those present understand that we are, at this level, at this point of oscillation, where we perceive something manifesting in the extreme passion for the collector’s object?

This is one of the forms of the object of desire. What the subject shows would be nothing other than the most intimate point of themselves. What is borne by this object is precisely what they cannot reveal, even to themselves. It is something that exists on the very threshold of the greatest secret. This is the path we must take to understand what the miser’s treasure chest is to them. We must certainly take another step to fully grasp the miser’s position, which is why the miser can only be treated comedically.

What we are dealing with, what we are being introduced to, is this: starting from a certain moment, the subject becomes engaged in articulating their wish (vœu) as a secret. How is this wish expressed? In those forms of language to which I alluded last time, for which various languages, modes, registers, and tones have been invented.

Do not always trust what grammarians say about this—the subjunctive is not as subjunctive as it seems. And as for the type of wish—

I am searching my memory for something that might illustrate this for you, and, for some reason, this little poem has resurfaced in my mind. I had some difficulty piecing it back together and situating it, but here it is:

“To be a beautiful, blonde, popular girl who brings joy to the air,
And whose smile gives appetite to the workers of Saint-Denis.”

This was written by someone who is our contemporary, a discreet poetess, whose defining characteristics include being small and dark-skinned, and who, without a doubt, expresses, in her nostalgia for giving appetite to the workers of Saint-Denis, something that could strongly resonate with specific moments of her ideological reveries. However, it cannot be said that this is her ordinary preoccupation.

What I want to briefly highlight for you, regarding this phenomenon—which is a poetic phenomenon—is, first, something important about its temporal structure.

Perhaps this represents the pure form—not of the wish but of the wished-for, that is, what in the wish is articulated as the wished-for. Let us say that the primitive subject is elided, but this means nothing. The subject is not elided, because what is articulated here is the wished-for—something presented in the infinitive form, as you can see. And if you attempt to delve into the structure, you will see that this is situated in a position—a position of being ahead of the subject and determining it retroactively.

This is neither a simple aspiration nor a regret; it is something that positions itself before the subject, retroactively determining them within a certain type of being.

This is entirely in suspension. Nevertheless, it is precisely how the wished-for is articulated, already giving us something to consider when trying to make sense of the phrase with which The Interpretation of Dreams ends:

“The indestructible wish shapes the present in the image of the past.”

[…aber diese vom Träumer für gegenwärtig genommene Zukunft ist durch den unzerstörbaren Wunsch zum Ebenbild jener Vergangenheit gestaltet. (End of Die Traumdeutung)]

This, which we hear as a kind of hum, something we immediately ascribe to repetition or retroaction, is not necessarily certain when closely examined. Namely, if “the indestructible wish shapes the present in the image of the past,” perhaps it is because, like the carrot before the donkey, it is always ahead of the subject, continually producing the same effects retroactively.

This introduces us to the ambiguity of this statement through its structural characteristics, for the somewhat “gratuitous” nature, if I may say so, of this enunciation has consequences that do not prevent us from exploring them.

I mean that nothing prevents us from delving into the following observation: that this poetically expressed wish—entitled, as if by chance, and I verified this in the text, Secret Wishes—is what resurfaced in my memory after 25 or perhaps 30 years, while searching for something that could lead us to the secret of the wish.

This secret wish, naturally, is communicable.

And that is the whole problem: how can one communicate to others something that has been constituted as a secret? The answer: through a kind of lie. Because ultimately, for us—who may consider ourselves a bit more astute than others—this translates as:

“As true as it is that I am a beautiful, blonde, and popular girl, I wish to bring joy to the air
and give appetite to the workers of Saint-Denis.”

And it is not at all certain that any person—even one generous, poetic, or a poetess—would truly want to bring joy to the air. After all, why? Why, if not in the realm of fantasy? Why, if not to demonstrate how profoundly the object of fantasy is metonymic?

In other words, joy circulates in this way. As for the workers of Saint-Denis, “they have broad shoulders,” enough to bear the burden among themselves, as there are already too many of them for anyone to know to whom one should address this wish.

On this digression, I introduce you to the structure of the wish through the medium of poetry. We can now approach it through the lens of serious matters, namely, the effective role of desire—a desire that we have seen, as expected, must indeed find its place somewhere between:

• That point from which we began, where the subject is essentially alienated, within the alienation of the call, the call of need, insofar as it must enter the narrow passages of the signifier,
• And that beyond where the dimension of the unsaid emerges as essential.

…it must find articulation somewhere.

We see this in the dream I have chosen, a dream that is undoubtedly among the most problematic as it involves the appearance of a deceased person. This dream of a dead person’s appearance, about which FREUD—on page 433 of the German edition of The Interpretation of Dreams and pages 366 and 367 of the English translation—has not fully revealed its secret, even though he articulates many significant points about it, remains essential.

It is in this context that FREUD emphasized, most strongly throughout his analysis of dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams, the profound insight of the initial approach to the psychology of the unconscious: the ambivalence of feelings toward loved and respected figures.

This ambivalence is something revisited in the dream I have chosen to start articulating the function of desire in dreams for you. You may have noticed that I recently re-read The Interpretation of Dreams in its first edition for specific purposes, and at the same time, during our last session, I alluded to the fact that people always forget what is in The Interpretation of Dreams.

I myself had forgotten that this dream was added in 1930. It was first added as a note shortly after its publication in Sammlung Kleiner Schriften Für Neurosenlehre (1913, Volume III, page 271 of the second edition) and then incorporated into the text of the 1930 edition of The Interpretation of Dreams.

This dream is as follows, and I repeat it for you: the subject sees his father appear before him—this father whom he has just lost after a long illness that caused him much torment. He sees his father appear before him, and, as the text tells us, he is overcome with profound grief at the thought that his father is dead and that “he did not know.” FREUD emphasizes the absurd resonance of this formulation, explaining that it is completed and understood when we add that the father was dead “according to his wish.” That is, he did not know that his father’s death was, of course, in line with his own unconscious wish.

Here is how I represent this on the graph according to the following structure: the statement “He did not know” fundamentally pertains to the dimension of the subject’s constitution, insofar as it is upon such an “unnecessary” “He did not know” that the subject must situate himself. And it is precisely there—this is what we will attempt to explore in detail through experience—that the subject must constitute himself as “not knowing,” the only point of entry granted to him for the “unsaid” to truly take on the scope of an “unsaid.”

This occurs at the level of the statement. However, no such statement can exist without being underpinned by the substratum of an enunciation. For any being that does not speak—and we have evidence of this—“He was dead” means nothing. I would go further: we have empirical tests for this, including the immediate indifference that most animals display toward the remains and corpses of their kind as soon as they become cadavers.

For an animal to attach itself to a deceased individual—dogs are a commonly cited example—it must be in an exceptional posture. If not endowed with an unconscious, the animal must have a superego. That is, something must come into play to allow for a certain rudimentary articulation of meaning. But let us set that aside.

The phrase “He was dead” already presupposes that the subject has been introduced to something belonging to the order of existence. Existence is nothing other than the fact that, from the moment the subject is situated within the signifier, they can no longer annihilate themselves. They enter into an intolerable sequence, which unfolds immediately in the imaginary, compelling them to conceive of themselves as always rebounding into existence.

This is not a philosopher’s construct; I have observed it in those we call “patients.” I recall a patient for whom this became a pivotal moment in her inner experience. In a particular dream—undoubtedly at a specific point in her analysis—she encountered something apprehended and lived within the dream that was none other than a pure feeling of existence, an experience of existing in an indefinite manner. From within this existence, a new existence continually surged for her, expanding indefinitely in her intimate intuition, as if extending into the infinite. Existence, apprehended and felt as something that, by its nature, could only extinguish itself by endlessly rebounding further. This was accompanied for her by an intolerable pain.

This is closely tied to the content of the dream. After all, what do we have here? We have a dream experienced by a son. It is always worth noting when discussing a dream that the dream belongs to the dreamer. This is something we must always keep in mind when beginning to analyze the characters within the dream.

What do we have here?

The problem of what is called “identification” arises with particular ease, because in dreams there is no need for dialectics to imagine some relationship of identification between the subject and their own dream fantasies. What do we have? We have the subject standing before his father, overwhelmed by the deepest grief, and opposite him, we have the father who does not know he is dead. Or more precisely—since we must place this within the timeframe in which the subject perceives it and communicates it to us—“He did not know.”

I emphasize this point, though I cannot insist on it completely at the moment. Yet I always aim to avoid approximations that might lead to obscurities, even though this principle sometimes prevents me from offering you definitive explanations right away, leaving certain doors open. Nonetheless, it is important, with regard to dreams, to remember that the way they are communicated to us is always a statement.

What does the subject report to us? Another statement. But it is not sufficient to leave it at that. It is another statement that the subject presents to us as an enunciation. For it is a fact that the subject recounts the dream so that we may seek its key, its meaning—in other words, what it wants to express, which is something entirely different from the statement that is reported to us.

The fact, then, that this phrase “He did not know” is expressed in the imperfect tense is entirely significant in this perspective.

Subject’s side (2 divided by 1)
Grief
“That he was dead”

Other side (3 divided by 1)
“He did not know”
“That he was dead”

(According to his wish) (4 outside the division of 1)

“He did not know”: In what I articulate here—for those interested in the relationship between the dream and the speech through which we gather it—this phrase may touch upon the first layer of the split (1) in its depiction.

Let us continue. Here is how things are divided:

• On one side (2), on the side of what is presented in the dream as the subject, what do we find? An affect—grief. Grief about what? “That he was dead.”
• And on the other side (3), corresponding to this grief: “He did not know” about what? The same thing: “That he was dead.”

FREUD tells us that this is where the meaning lies, and implicitly its interpretation, and it seems quite simple. I have, however, sufficiently indicated to you that it is not.

In addition (4): “According to his wish.” But what does this mean? If we are—as FREUD explicitly directs us to be, not only in this passage but in the one I asked you to refer to regarding repression—if we are on the level of the signifier, you should immediately see that we can make more than one use of this “according to his wish.” “He was dead according to his wish”—where does this lead us?

It seems to me that at least some of you might recall the point I once led you to, that of the subject who, after having exhausted every possible form of desire—

As desire pertains to the unknown subject, the punishment for what crime? For no crime other than the crime of having existed within this desire—

Finds themselves brought to the point where they have no other exclamation left to utter than this μή ϕῦναι (mè phunai) [“not to have been born” from Oedipus at Colonus], this “not to have been born” to which existence arrives when desire itself has been extinguished.

And the grief the subject feels in the dream—let us not forget that this is a subject about whom we know little other than the immediate antecedent: that he witnessed his father’s death after the agonies of a long illness filled with torment—this grief is close, in experience, to the pain of existence when nothing else remains within it but existence itself. When, in the excess of suffering, everything tends toward abolishing that indestructible term that is the desire to live. This pain of existing, of existing when desire is no longer present—if anyone has lived it, it was someone who is far from a stranger to the subject.

But in any case, what is clear is that in the dream, the subject knew this grief. Whether the one who felt it in reality knew it or not, we will never know. However, what is evident is that neither in the dream, nor certainly outside the dream—at least not before the interpretation leads us there—does the subject himself know that what he is assuming is precisely this grief as such. And the proof is that he can articulate it in the dream only in a faithful, cynical manner, one that absurdly responds to what?

FREUD answers this if we refer to the brief chapter in The Interpretation of Dreams where he speaks of absurd dreams, particularly with reference to this specific dream. And this, in fact, confirms what I was attempting to articulate here before re-reading it. We see that he specifies that if the feeling of absurdity in dreams is often tied to this sort of contradiction, linked to the structure of the unconscious itself, which in some cases leads to the comical, this absurdity—he says so regarding this dream—enters the dream as an element of what? An element expressive of a particularly violent repudiation of the meaning designated here. And indeed, the subject may see that his father did not know the subject’s wish—that his father should die to put an end to his suffering.

At this level, the subject does, in fact, know what his wish is. He may or may not see—depending on the point of analysis where he stands—that this wish was his in the past: that his father should die. And not for his father, but for himself, the subject, who was his rival. But what he cannot see at all, at the point where he stands, is this: that in assuming his father’s grief, without knowing it, what is targeted is to maintain before him, in the object, this ignorance that is absolutely necessary for him—the ignorance that consists in not knowing that it is better never to have been born. [Cf. the μή ϕῦναι (mè phunai) of Oedipus at Colonus].

At the last term of existence, there is nothing but the grief of existing. Better to assume it—as the grief of the Other who is there and who continues to speak, just as I, the dreamer, continue to speak—than to see this last mystery exposed, which is ultimately nothing other than the most secret content of this wish. The content of this wish—which we have no direct element of in the dream itself, aside from what we know through our understanding—is, in fact, the wish for the father’s castration. It is the quintessential wish, which, at the moment of the father’s death, returns to the son because it is now his turn to be castrated. This is precisely what must not, under any circumstances, be seen.

And at this moment, I am not laying out the terms, the point, or the timing where interpretation must be applied. It would already be easy, based on this schema, to show you that there is an initial interpretation that immediately occurs: it is no struggle to articulate “He didn’t know”—“Your father, according to your wish, didn’t know”—as the enunciation of the wish. At this level, we are already within the clear line of the subject’s speech, and it is well and good that this is so.

However, there must be a certain introduction by the analyst, one that introduces something problematic into this remark. This serves to bring to the surface what has so far been repressed and fragmented: namely, that he had already been dead for a long time “according to his wish,” the Oedipal wish, and to bring this to light from the unconscious.

Yet we must recognize and fully grasp the extent of this “something” which, as before, goes far beyond the question of what this wish is. For this wish to castrate the father, with its return upon the subject, goes far beyond any justifiable desire.

If it is, as we say, a structuring necessity, a signifying necessity—and here, the wish is merely the mask for what lies deepest in the structure of desire, as revealed by the dream—it is nothing less, and nothing more, than the essence of “according to,” of the relationship, the necessary chain that prevents the subject from escaping the concatenation of existence as determined by the nature of the signifier.

This “according to” is the point I want to draw your attention to: that ultimately, in this problematic of the erasure of the subject—which, in this instance, is their salvation—at this final point, where the subject must be consigned to a final ignorance, the mechanism, the Verdrängung (repression)—as I began to introduce to you at the very end of our last session—rests entirely on this mechanism of repression.

Not on the repression of something complete, of something discoverable, of something visible or understandable, but on the elision of a pure and simple signifier: of the nach, the “according to,” of what signals the agreement or discordance, the concord or discord between enunciation and the signifier, between what is within the statement and what lies in the necessities of enunciation. It is around the elision of a clause, a pure and simple signifier, that everything subsists. And ultimately, what manifests in the desire of the dream is this: “He didn’t know.”

What does it mean, in the absence of any other meaning that we might have at our disposal?

We will see this when we examine the dream of someone we know better, because next time, we will take a dream of FREUD himself, the one closely related to this one—the dream FREUD has about his father, where he sees him in the form of GARIBALDI.

At that point, we will go further, and we will truly see what FREUD’s desire is. And those who reproach me for not addressing anal erotism enough will get their due! But for now, let us stop here, at this schematic dream, this dream of the subject’s confrontation with death. What does it mean?

By calling upon this shadow, this sense will emerge, because this dream means nothing other than:
“He is not dead; he can suffer in place of the other.”

But behind this suffering, what persists is the lure around which, at this crucial moment, the subject can only cling to one thing:

• Precisely, the rival,
• The murder of the father,
• The imaginary fixation.

And it is here that we will pick up next time, around the explanation that I believe I have sufficiently prepared through today’s articulation—the elucidation of the following formula as the constant formula of the unconscious fantasy: $◊a.

This relationship of the subject, inasmuch as the subject is barred, nullified, abolished by the action of the signifier, and finds its support in the Other—in what defines, for the speaking subject, the object as such. Namely, it is to the Other that we will attempt to assign identification, and we will do so very quickly, because…

Those who attended the first year of this seminar heard me discuss it for an entire term—

…this Other, this prevailing object of human erotism, is the image of one’s own body in the broad sense we will give it [i(a)].

It is there, in this instance, in this human fantasy—which is the fantasy of oneself as nothing more than a shadow—it is there that the subject maintains their existence, maintains the veil that allows them to continue being a speaking subject.